Paul, Damaris and Culture

Special events come … and then they go and they are gone.

You can look forward to an anniversary, a special birthday, a family celebration… it’s ages coming, then it’s upon you … and then it’s gone.

The same happens with sporting events. You are looking forward to Wimbledon, or the Cricket Festival … and then suddenly it’s upon you and it’s gone.

Yesterday worked like that in two ways for me – a family celebration as the daughter of a cousin got married – excitement, the day is there and then it’s over in a trice. We went early and stayed overnight with Natalie’s former headmaster and his wife – we know them better as Martin and Liz Blazey.

Of course, yesterday was a great sporting occasion – one we have been looking forward to for almost a couple of months – the new-look Robins first game of the season – you look forward to meeting Cirencester Town – and then it’s over in a trice – or at least 90 minutes!

The major festivals of the Christian year are just like that … you look forward to Christmas, count down the days, you look forward to Easter and mark Lent – then the festival is there and it’s over in a trice.

Or it is?

A game is over and complete – Wimbledon has come and gone for another year. That’s the kind of event you look forward to and then it’s all over.

But a wedding is different – you look forward to it, build up to it … and then it’s over – but it continues to shape the rest of your lives together.

Do you see the difference?

I think we should treat the Christian festivals like that – especially the one that’s just past. Pentecost.

We celebrate it at our weekend away – we look forward to that weekend away – and then it’s all over. In the past. And Pentecost with it.

But no … Pentecost is an event that then has reverberations afterwards. Indeed it was an event that went on to shape the rest of the lives of the first followers of Jesus.

The round of Christian festivals we observe because they shape the rest of our lives.

That’s why I wanted to take the story of Pentecost forwards – and see how people’s lives are shaped not just by what happened at Pentecost but by the life and teaching, the death and resurrection of Jesus and the outpouring of the Holy Spirit.

That’s the story of Act. But what’s interesting about the book of Acts is that it contains not just an account of the things those first followers of Jesus did. It also contains a number of the speeches they gave to explain their faith, all it meant to them and the impact the whole Christian faith can have on people’s lives.

It gives you a fascinating glimpse of the preaching and the teaching of the first followers of Jesus.

The genius of Paul is that he is able to relate his faith in Jesus Christ to very different sets of people. There are occasions when he meets with people steeped in the Jewish religion and in what we think of as the Old Testament, the Hebrew Scriptures. On those occasions he makes references to those Scriptures, demonstrates as do those other followers of Jesus that Jesus is the fulfilment of the Law and the Prophets and that through is death and resurrection and the outpouring of the Holy Spirit a presence is let loose into the world that doesn’t just shape what we do in the world, but it gives us a new dimension to our lives.

But then there are other occasions when Paul engages with people who have no knowledge of the Hebrew Scriptures and are in an entirely different culture, the culture of the Greek-speaking part of the Roman emperor with its own traditions and ways of thinking about life. On those occasions he doesn’t quote from the Bible, but instead draws on that culture and shows how it too speaks in some way of God and he then shows that into that culture Jesus has something enormous to say.

He arrives in Athens and straightaway you see the two sides of Paul – there’s a Jewish community there and so he goes to the synagogue and there he draws on all his skills as a Pharisee, his rabbinic training, and he argues from the Hebrew Scriprtures that Jesus is indeed the fulfilment of the Law and the Prophets.

But then he goes into the market places and there engages with anyone who happened to be there. That’s the civic centre, the Agora. There he engages with Epicurean and Stoic philosphers who debated with him. He arouses curiosity, and they bring him to the Areopagus – the hill of Ares and there they want to listen to him in full. In some ways the place were disputes were settled.

What is fascinating is that you see this process going on in Athens today. When you see what is happening in Syntagma Square in the heart of Athens at the moment, it is fascinating that what is going on there has its roots in the ancient world of Athens. Faced with major problems today campaigners, politicians, union leaders, writers, thinkers have taken over Syntagma Square. There in different parts of the square lively discussions and debates are taking place as people try to work out how to respond to the crisis in Greece at the moment.

That’s what you catch a glimpse of Paul doing here in Athens.

It’s fascinating to see his approach. He starts where the people are.

He touches their sense of the religious – and interestingly he does it in a respectful way. He has found an altar with an inscription ‘to an unknown god’: he takes that as his starting point and sets his stall out, “What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you.”

If we want to engage with people around us and share what’s important for us, we need to start where they are. There is a sense of the ‘spiritual’ – we need to respect that. Start where people are … and move on to explain something more.

Think of people around – is it some sense of the spiritual, some sense of something there?

Paul starts with the immensity of the world in all its beauty. The immensity of the God who made the world and everything in it, the Lord of heaven and earth – and the impossibility of tying such a God down into shrines made by human hands.

That resonates for me … the greatness of God – the sheer sense of awe and wonder.

It is the last time the shuttle will take astronauts up the Space Station. Russia takes over where the USA leaves off in getting people up to the Space Station. Their descriptions of the awe they have at seeing the curvature of the earth, encased by that thin blue line of the atmosphere is a wonderful sense of awe and wonder.

The universality of the sense of ‘the other’ the sense of the divine. In all ages. In all parts of the world. Some sense of the other.

Paul has read the poetry of the time – and he quotes one of those poets – In him we live and move and have our being.”

I love that way of talking about God. As the one ‘in whom’ we live and move and have our being. The being of God, being itself, God as the ground of our being. All ways of thinking of God that go back half a century and more and speak powerfully.

I sometimes it would help if we got away from the non-biblical view of God as the Designer, the clock-maker, and re-discovered a more biblical way of thinking about God such as Paul offers here. God as the one in whom we live and move and have our being. The being of God, being itself, the ground of all being. Those were vogue words half a century ago, but they have their value now.

Interestingly in the debates among scientists over God, John Polkinghorne, a phyusicist, cosmologist, a vicar and a Christian thinker suggests we should get away from the idea of God as a designer that dates back only a couple of hundred years to someone called William Paley, the thinking that was rejected by Darwin, and seek another way of thinking about God. He suggests thinking of God as ‘one who is the ground of the fruitful order that makes any process possible at all.” [John Polkinghorne, Theology in the Context of Science (SPCK, 2008), 62]

God as the one in whom we live and move and have our being.

Then Paul turns to Jesus Christ – and what he suggests that Jesus provides a yard stick, a measure by which to judge right from wrong. He appeals to the teaching of Jesus – the thought that right and wrong matter.

His speech reaches its climax with mention of the resurrection.

No mention of the name of Jesus.

Some scoff. Some are intrigued. Paul finishes.

The moment has passed – but for some that moment becomes a life-changing moment that shapes the rest of their lives.

But some joined him and became believers., including Dionysius the Areopagite and a woman named Damaris, and others with them.

Just a handful of people whose lives were touched, changed and for ever afterwards shaped by this Jesus. Two of them named.

That’s the task. Let’s keep to it. And if only a handful are shaped by what is at the heart of the faith – that too is precious.

These two were touched by Paul as he spoke to them through their culture.

And Damaris has given her name to a website that emails out a culture watch – and aims to relate the Christian faith to the culture of today. The task we each of us are called to rise to.